QUITO – Ecuador feels that the Paris Accord is not enough and it didn’t come in time, but the world must use the platform it provides to move forward on fighting climate change because “it’s what there is.”

“It’s what a little fewer than 180 countries have agreed to,” said Ecuador’s environment minister, Tarsicio Granizo, for whom the agreement is a tool that must be strengthened and defended.

And one of the points that he most regrets is – in contrast to the Kyoto Protocol – the Paris Accord does not include obligatory commitments for countries thanks, he said, to the pressure exerted by greenhouse gas emitting nations.

Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa said that a “great debt” exists in climate change that the industrialized countries “have to assume” and fulfill vis-a-vis the nations of the South.

Given the “enormous” costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, she questioned the lack of resource commitments by the industrialized nations to the $100 billion Green Climate Fund (GCF), resources earmarked for the developing countries.

The GCF is a financial mechanism which helps fund climate finance investment in low-emission, climate-resilient development.

Based on experts’ calculations, she argued that the effects of reducing greenhouse gas emissions on countries like Ecuador “will cost of $300 billion. The offering of the developed countries is $100 billion and the money that has been provided is $6 billion.”

Thus, Ecuador, as president of the G77 + China, will take advantage of the UN Climate Change Conference being held in Bonn, Germany, to remind developed nations that the greater portion of greenhouse gas emissions are their responsibility in terms of ensuring technology transfer to Southern countries and in financing the adaptation to – and mitigation of – climate change.

Granizo said that another thing that is lacking in the Paris Accord is “a little bit of ambition” among industrialized nations, including the US, to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Espinosa said that the US withdrawal from the Paris Accord “is clear evidence of the lack of commitment and shared responsibility.”

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